Techno-economic analysis of direct coal-biomass to liquids (CBTL) plants with shale gas utilization and CO2 capture and storage (CCS)

In this paper, techno-economic analysis of direct coal biomass to liquids (CBTL) plants is performed in Aspen Process Economic Analyzer (APEA) using high fidelity process models developed in Aspen Plus for four different configurations of direct CBTL plants. Results from the economic model are validated with the data in the open literature, if available. Sensitivity studies are conducted to evaluate the impacts of key investment parameters, design parameters, and potential government-subsidized credits on the main economic measures including net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR), break-even oil price (BEOP) and equivalent oil price (EOP). Using the North America 2015 pricing basis in APEA, this study shows that the BEOP of direct CBTL processes ranges from $56.9/bbl to $80.5/bbl for large scale (50,000 bbl/day) plants and from $77.3/bbl to $97.5/bbl for small scale (10,000 bbl/day) plants. It is observed that integrating a carbon capture and storage (CCS) unit to the direct CBTL process can increase the BEOP by about 10%, while utilization of the cheap and abundant shale gas (especially in the continental US) can make the direct liquefaction processes considerably more attractive than the indirect CBTL processes.